


How To Make Ends Meet

by abbichicken



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Developing Relationship, Disturbing Themes, Gunplay, M/M, Mansion Fic, Mindfuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-13
Updated: 2011-07-13
Packaged: 2017-10-21 08:53:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/223359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abbichicken/pseuds/abbichicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"If you know you can do it, you're not challenging yourself."</p>
            </blockquote>





	How To Make Ends Meet

"If you know you can do it, you're not challenging yourself."

Erik's eyes twitch, and Charles tries to think out what he's not saying. When you can bounce inside someone's brain and find out the truths they don't understand of themselves, analysing a normal situation without doing this can be tough, so playing murder is spiking him a thousand and one questions he'd rather have answered with a truth than with this shaky conversation they're engaged in. Why the hell would Erik ask this of him, anyway? To show off? To make a point? What fucking point? I don't care about myself? I'm so amazing, I'm invulnerable? Charles believes everything about Erik is only about Erik, about those things, these things he can see hiding away in there.

It is about none of these things.

Erik shakes the tension out of his shoulders, and takes a breath. His expression defines disappointment. "Charles, why is it that we're all training, here, except you?"

Charles smiles and tries to find somewhere to put the gun down, because it's too heavy in his hand, and he's terrified of pulling the trigger by mistake and shooting himself in the knee, or worse, but there isn't anywhere safe, so he holds it slightly away from himself, looking awkward.

"I don't need to train. I know my power. I know what I can do with, to, for, anyone. I've spent my life mastering my abilities. And as for now, I've been practicing with Cerebro, haven't I? What are you asking me?"

"Just that - when do you challenge yourself, Charles?"

Erik's thin smile suggests salivating anticipation, as he lunges close, grabs at Charles' side, long fingers taking an unnaturally strong grip at his ribcage. Charles squirms, sensation between tickled and electric shock, but doesn't pull away. Magnetic as Erik's powers are, they are nothing, for Charles, compared with his eyes, and his...aura.

Charles looks up - too far up for comfort, makes him feel exceptionally small, Erik at this angle - and Erik's eyes are dark and sparking.

Charles realises the gun is raising in his hand, without his consent.

"I can shoot it for you, if you like," Erik says.

"Shoot it, and stop the bullet yourself? What game are you playing?"

"The kind of game you call training, when it's anyone else at hand. It's not me that needs challenging, Charles, it's you."

Charles feels a slash of cold shock in his spine, the air around him seeming to thicken and choke. He takes a step back, sidling from Erik's grasp, gun raising, raising, pointing again at Erik's head and they're right where they were a minute ago.

"Erik, please, you have to..."

"Calm my mind?"

Erik is so perfectly, marvellously calm, disturbingly calm, that Charles is lost for retort. He can't resist, when he can't instruct, and pushes behind Erik's eyes, delving for answers to questions he can't form.

He sees things he can't digest. Himself, bloody, on the gravel, Erik standing over him, a knife - gun - _flash_ \- knife - gun - clenched fist - _broken teeth_ redness spilling out from his mouth, from a gash in his chest, from a hole in his side, and Erik standing over him with a smile - a look of horror - tears in his eyes - contentment - and back in the here and now, Erik is upon him, wrenching the gun from his hand and pressing, wrapping himself so tight to Charles that he can feel Erik's heart pounding against him. He struggles, but has no purchase, and he tries to clear Erik's thoughts and look behind them, but is too affected, too...frightened...shaking...

"You should knock first," Erik says, smirkingly appreciative of the effect his thoughts (fantasies?) have had as Charles slips out of his mind, tremoring in his arms.

"What...why..."

Charles registers that, against his hip, Erik is viciously hard and pressing, harder, harder, against him, crushingly close. He can feel the gun in Erik's hand, now, barrel dug deep into his shoulderblade, twisting, pushing as hard as it can. He whimpers in plain fear, and Erik laughs so low that it's vibration, rather than sound.

"Imagine the weapon you could be, Charles Xavier, if you would only let yourself be the mutant you are."

"I...I'm perfectly comfortable with who I am." His words are so wet and limp, they're barely audible, but Erik understands as if they were spoken inside them.

"You're not. You've no idea what you are, Charles, no idea, you're gifted, yes, superior, unmistakably, you think you know what it is to be like the rest of us, but you only see, you don't know." He's fervent, desperate to convey. Charles is in no position to digest this.

"I do, Erik, I do know, I have felt...please..."

"No! You need to push yourself, challenge yourself. You need to abandon these human morals, you need to embrace these things, these thoughts, these...ideas, what it is to hurt and be hurt, what it is to wield your power for your own goals. I know I could shoot you, my friend, I know I could, if I needed to. I could do anything, Charles, to anyone, to survive. Even to you. Maybe that's what you need, maybe you need to suffer a little."

Charles thrashes and Erik holds him tighter still. He's struggling for breath, and Erik's damp chest is hot with the scent of control.

 _Don't..._

"Don't fight with me in my head like a fucking coward, do it with me here, to my face. Or I shall..."

Erik blinds himself with his own thoughts, fantasies, contemplations, every vengeful fantasy he's ever had, projected onto Charles. Even if Charles chooses not to see these things, when Erik leans down and sinks sharp teeth into his shoulder, deep and bruising deep through all that fucking tweed, there is no mistaking that he is determined to get this pain, this sensation and capability into him, any which way it will take.

The gun stabs at Charles' back as they shift in this uncomfortable clutch, and when Erik bites even harder still, clamping his throat in the crook of the arm with the gun still dug into his back, Charles is dazed, airless, his mind zapping at nothing, and he slips on the gravel, gasping with the tightness as Erik gladly lets himself go over with the imbalance, flattening Charles down hard, stones sticking into his spine and soldering into his shoulders.

A shot cracks out, fired away from them. Charles' eyes are wide, and staring, certain it's ripped into him because everything is so instant and close, he's waiting for an impact, no idea what's happening, completely transfixed by Erik's cold eyes this-close up.

Things take far perspective, and time seems to slow.

The bullet appears above Erik's head, hovers, rescued from its distant trajectory, redirected.

Teeth clenched, face red, Erik spits, "I could just...let it go. Imagine that. I'd die here on top of you."

"Why...why would you say..."

Charles closes his eyes and slips back into Erik's mind. He searches through a file of horrors, sights he feels he can't unsee, and senses Erik's complete detachment from _everything_. Everything except him. Charles feels himself inside Erik's heart, fuzzed and heated and coated in arterial blood and essential, in a way that he has never imagined, to Erik's continued existence. _Since you forced yourself into my life,_ Erik's insides say, _you're a part of me. A part of this._

 _I don't want this_ , Charles pushes, tasting the swathes of terrifying grandeur Erik desires for them both.

"You don't know," Charles tries to say, fighting for each word to form properly, believing that Erik will listen if he speaks, rather than dismissing everything that comes to mind, "you don't know...all this is wrong...if you could only get past what's happened to you...if you could only see that they aren't all like that, that people can learn...you don't have to separate yourself from... "

The bullet drops to the ground with a _ping_ onto the gravel as Erik exhales into Charles' face. "Enough!" he shouts, scrabbling, chest-to-chest flat down and his hands grasping into Charles' hair, yanking tight and holding him so close, too close. "Your fucking morals! Right and wrong, right and fucking wrong, right and wrong will get you - us - all of us - killed one day, you know that, and yet you're so very willing to pretend that we can play by the same rules..."

"Erik, please...please...if you would only..."

"Please yourself, Charles, I don't have a kink for the sound of your whining. This isn't something that gets me off..."

For an eternity his hand is at Charles' throat, pressing him down so hard Charles is choking, blacking out, and then Erik throws himself back, breathless and furious,face warped into a gritted scowl, his body soaked in the sweat of effort and fury.

Charles covers his face with his hands, breathing deep and holding onto all the reality he can.

"I dread to think," he says, when he can prop himself up enough to see Erik sat there, staring, glaring at him, "what gets you off, based on the size of the bruise your erection was giving me there..."

Erik winces, affronted by Charles' sincerity, his interest in always trying to bring him back down from the heights he aspires to, his need to make fucking jokes whenever his own failures are called to question. He snaps, "You always want to make me something worse, you want to cast judgement on what's natural to us. Charles, imagine, you, at your best. Imagine if you were everything you could be. Imagine the power you would have. Imagine what you could do to me, to anyone, if you tried."

"You assume that because we could, we should. I don't want to do terrible things. We have a responsibility to..."

"We have no fucking responsibility to anyone but each other! And you won't even honour that. You want to live with human boundaries, with human desires and constraints...let yourself go, Charles..."

Erik plays out in his mind the release, the aching torrent of feelings he would get from shooting Charles in the side, from holding his hand over a bleeding wound, from sucking out the bullet with his mouth instead of his powers, envisages laughing with bloody teeth and a glowing sense of accomplishment. He projects everything he can into it, ties up feelings from every assault, coercion, threat, triumph, everything he can readily access, to make it more dramatic to Charles, to try and convey the levels of feelings he can conjure up, because he's lived outside the rules of humans, because he was made to be that way.

Charles' eyes are red, with strain, emotion, horror, any of these things.

Above them, dark clouds gather, watching the scene playing down on the ground.

 _If you truly weren't interested,"_ Erik thinks, clear as Times New Roman, _"you wouldn't still be in here, in my head. I know you're watching these thoughts. I know you're trying to get behind them, but I promise you, Charles, this isn't something that needs a diagnosis, this is part of what we share. You deserve to understand this power, this feeling._

"I don't understand why you think this will help me," Charles tries, summoning all the composure he has, "but please, please, you're really fucking hurting me with this..."

 _Get out, then. Or stop me. Turn it into hugs and puppies._

"I will. I can."

"You won't. You don't enjoy what you can do, not with me. You think you're cheating, bending my mind. You want me to make the decisions you'd make all by myself."

"I understand why you feel this way, my friend, I do, truly -"

"Don't fucking say that again! You have the theory, you have the imagery, but you don't _know_. You don't know what it's like to live only like this, not to flip back into your comfortable world of cute human interactions, to have your sweet little safe-mansion, you don't ever have to truly live, Charles, you don't fucking know how to feel. You won't let yourself be what we are."

"What are we, then? The better men?"

Erik's lip curls in mock-pity. "We're so much more than men."

Thunder breaks their tension, and Erik backs off, shaking his head. "I can't be this close to you when all you want to do is break me apart..."

Charles smiles, in relief and endearment, rather than anything else, and tries to edge forwards to Erik again. "Come on, we'll..."

"No," Erik says, and, running hands through his hair, straightening his filthy, sodden tracksuit, he runs off, full pelt, and keeps fucking running, until his body is sore and his chest is dry of oxygen and it hurts to breathe.  
______

Charles sits out in the storm for longer than he should, turning everyone who wants to come and ask him if he's okay, what's going on, away before they so much as get out the door of the house.

The storm breaks, and Charles soaks up the rain, wishing it would wash away the things he's seen, wondering what the fuck to make of it all, how to explain something so far from anything he's ever known.

Erik is beyond the limit of Charles' understanding, and this is the most painful thing of all. Charles has never felt so limited as he does beneath Erik's body, inside his mind.  
______

Erik knocks on the door of Charles' study, late that night. He's spent a while pacing, a little longer hacking at bits of wood with a knife, a short time flinging paperclips at passing students, and an insufficiency of time jerking off over the relieved details of his afternoon. He showered and changed and is sleek in black and perfectly phrased. Nothing stops this raging sensation that here is an opportunity wasted, a chance for something he's never had, quelled, a man who wants everything he does, refusing for the sake of nothing but his own poor framework of judgement, but his emotions have been coiled up and fastened tight, knotted away and caged so that he can come and claim the release he thinks he should have tried for before.

"Come!" Charles says, in response to the knock, like the antiquated old professor he seems to be striving to be. Erik rolls his eyes, to himself, and smiles.

"I'm not here to apologise," he starts.

"You're not? Not going to apologise at all, for all this?" Charles indicates his blackening eye, the scratches at his throat and makes general gestures suggesting the remaining discomfort that's managed to get beneath several layers of suit.

"Why would I? You'll look so pretty, under all that. Why don't you take it off and show me how damaged you are?"

"That's just what I've been trying to get you to do..."

"Fuck you Charles, we're not playing that again, let's leave it."

"I don't know if we can do anything but play that again. And again, and again. These _fucking_ games, I swear..."

"We can do anything we want, that's all I'm trying to teach you, _Professor_. You can freeze the world and we can run naked through the whole fucking lot of it, if you want. You can show everyone what we are, what we can do, what you know. You choose not to be who you are, every fucking day, and yet you talk of building an army, oh, you make me feel _tired_ , we are both so very much better than that."

"I don't know why you're still saying these things to me, you've worn me down, my dear, and wonderful an experience as that was, I don't think you're going to find a repeat performance any more satisfying, however many fantasies of the colour of my own insides you want to share with me."

"One day, Charles. One day, I'll find a way to make you understand what it is to suffer and triumph. What it is to rise above the race that spawned us. I will find a way, and you will wonder why you wasted all this time."

Charles shakes his head. "I do understand. I simply don't agree."

He feels Erik's contradiction at both parts of the sentence, and, with all of him, says, without speaking, with his eyes, as much as with his powers, _Leave it. Please._

Erik strides across the room, climbs onto the armchair, lithe for all his length, kneels on its arms, perfectly astride Charles. Whatever position Erik takes around him, it's always so _enveloping_ , deliciously overwhelming. It's not often Charles is given the opportunity to lose himself, and, in the interests of balance, he supposed just moments after that first, long ago time that he and Erik met, that at least these instincts are ones he need not hide. He decided that very instant that sexuality, like everything else, mutates, shifts, adapts, as required. It's as much an ingredient of balance as anything else.

"So," Charles asks, when he shouldn't be speaking any more, "can you be with me now?"

Erik's smile is thin and honest, but still gives Charles a pang of fear, anxiety that he can't place. Perhaps, the back of his mind wonders, as their lips meet, it's what love feels like, or is a part of that, at least.

As they consume each other, things are forgotten, put aside, for another day. There's always another day. Whatever Erik sees, shows, whatever he says, Charles believes they'll always have more time, that there is, still, a chance that he can make this right, that they need not forever be on opposing sides.

To Erik, it is Charles' stubborn belief in him, in that dreadful idea of _right_ held despite his best efforts to repel, repulse, disturb, that makes Charles more attractive to him than anyone he has ever met, or so much as dreamt of.

As they fuck, and once they end up entwined in sweat and firelight, stretched out on the floor in each other's arms, both quivering from exertion and exhaustion, each think that maybe, maybe they should save everything for this, and stop trying to convince and talk and share and be, that this is who they are and what they are to each other, and that it's beyond definition, that this is as far as they can ever go, that they can never be so together as they are when they're this far apart.


End file.
